Here Comes The Judge!

June 9, 2017

The Great Falls Tribune reported, “Wolverine study’s plan preferred to endangered species listing.” That is a common sentiment in the West, where almost anything is preferable to endangered species listings, and the accompanying federal control over private land. When I started as Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, we were just beginning our […]

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Strange Bedfellows in Aspen

June 1, 2017

The headline in a recent Free Range Report reads, “Water battle pits City of Aspen against feds, enviros.” Nobody familiar with Colorado politics could help smiling at the sarcastic irony in that headline. Aspen fighting environmentalists? We can just as easily imagine headlines proclaiming “Boulder battles liberals,” or “Iowa bans farming.” The issue here, though, […]

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Golly, What a Gully!

May 26, 2017

I remember my grandparents laughing at a famous old magazine cartoon. It depicted a bow-legged old cowboy with a gray beard seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. His wide-eyed exclamation was, “Golly, what a gully!” The Grand Canyon has been a source of awe and wonder for centuries. That old cowboy fully appreciated […]

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I’ll Build it for Only $50,000

May 19, 2017

When I heard about a National Park Service estimate of $78,000 to rebuild 86 feet of walkway, my first thought was, “I’ll do it for $50,000.” I am not a contractor, but for that price I could hire several. This is just a trail, but even nice concrete walkways in the South cost only $7 […]

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How Dare They Keep Promises!

May 12, 2017

The Trump Administration’s first annual budget proposal to Congress (for fiscal year 2018) seeks to reduce the EPA’s budget by a third, as promised. Some of the details are yet to emerge, but there is already a heated debate about major cuts in the agency’s Office of Enforcement & Compliance Assurance (OECA). Analysts say the […]

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Eating Tofu in the Dark

May 4, 2017

The UN International Panel on Climate Change has warned for 29 years about greenhouse gases warming the planet beyond its ability to sustain life. They say the most harmful gas is methane, and the largest source of methane emissions is cattle. As a result, several States are considering proposals to tax livestock. One common version […]

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A Horse of a Different Color

April 28, 2017

The animated movie, “Spirit: The Stallion of the Cimarron,” has entertained a generation of children. It is the story of a courageous wild horse that gets captured by the Cavalry, then by an Indian, and later by a nasty railroad – all of whom fail to tame him. Such wild horse stories have been popular […]

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Will Reason Yet Prevail?

April 21, 2017

Just when you think a lost battle is consigned to the history books, there may yet be an opportunity. It has been a decade since Colorado lost the battle against the “threatened” listing of a sub-species called “Preble’s meadow jumping mouse,” but there is suddenly a new chance for reason to win out. This little […]

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The Hotel California for Wildlife

April 14, 2017

Sometimes in speeches, I have compared the endangered species list to the Hotel California, where “you can check out but you can never leave.” It is a short way of explaining the problem of a system that adds hundreds of species to the endangered list, but never takes any off. When it comes to recovering […]

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They’re Not Listening Still

April 7, 2017

An oft-quoted line in the Simon and Garfunkel classic “The Sound of Silence” laments “people hearing without listening.” The same idea concludes Don McLean’s classic tribute to Vincent Van Gough, with the line “They would not listen, they’re not listening still – perhaps they never will.” People not hearing, or not listening, is a frequent […]

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